A-Z of the celebrity year: from Miley Cyrus in Stoneybatter to Shia LaBeouf in . . . a paper bag

Alamuddin

Successful human-rights barrister Amal Alamuddin married actor George Clooney in Venice. The reception was a right old wheeze. Bono sang. We don’t know if he was asked to or if he forced his tunes on the party.

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O is for O’Driscoll: you were great, Brian. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

Brooks

It was a summer of tears, declarations of eternal love and hissy fits as the nation’s relationship with Garth Brooks crumbled. The drama started when Dublin City Council refused to allow five Brooks concerts to go ahead in Croker. There were frantic calls to friends in high and low places – including the Taoiseach and the White House.

City manager Owen Keegan stood firm: Brooks could have three but not five gigs. The singer said “to choose which shows to do . . . would be like asking to choose one child over another”. He seemed to forget the council had already chosen which of his lucrative children would have to go.

Brooks said he was “crushed” to announce all five gigs were off. He told a newspaper months later that thinking about the sorry episode still made him teary. It just makes us weary.

Churchgoer

It's been quite the year for Hozier. The Bray singer's first album was released globally in October and entered the US charts at number two. The stand-out song, Take Me to Church, has earned him a Grammy nomination. He also made appearances on Letterman; Saturday Night Live; and, more recently, a fancy pants fashion show, which displeased some people.

Departures

When Ray D’Arcy’s Today FM departure became public it was a surprise for sure, but some of the responses were OTT. Thankfully, fellow broadcaster Ian Dempsey was a rock of sense. “It’s as if you’re reading about somebody who has passed on. Nobody’s dead here, so just relax, everybody,” he told listeners after the news broke. “It’s fine, it’s just that a person has decided to move from one job to another and the person who was doing the job in this particular company will be replaced by somebody else.” Good man, Ian.

Engagement notices

The most widely read such notice published in the London Times this year read simply: "The engagement is announced between Benedict, son of Wanda and Timothy Cumberbatch of London, and Sophie, daughter of Katharine Hunter of Edinburgh and Charles Hunter of London." The Cumberbitches (their word) were inconsolable.

Freebie

You'd imagine a big band's decision to make their music available free would be popular. You'd be wrong. While U2's 13th studio album, Songs of Innocence, was given for free to half a billion iTunes account holders, it was not entirely free from controversy. Social media lined up to slag the band for giving them something for nothing. An alternative would have been to, you know, not listen to it.

Gastro publicity

She came in nothing like a wrecking ball but it was still hard to miss Miley Cyrus when she popped into L Mulligan Grocer in Stoneybatter, Dublin, for her tea ahead of a performance in the arena formerly known as the Point in April. It came on the back of a rave review for the gastro-pub in the New York Times.

Honeymooners

Not since Shergar went missing has a search of the Irish countryside generated as much interest as the hunt for Kimye. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West arrived in Cork in May for a honeymoon after a wedding in Florence. Social media buzzed with rumours, and reporters were sent to remote locations to find the couple. Turns out they stayed in Castle Oliver, Co Limerick.

Idina

The brilliant Idina Menzel's Elsa conquered the world in Disney's Frozen. She won an Oscar. She starred on Broadway. She was nominated for a Grammy. And most people were able to pronounce her name too . . .

John Travolta

Travolta is an actor so you would imagine is quite used to learning scripts. When introducing the contenders for the Oscar for best song at the Academy Awards, all he had to do was remember ". . . Idina Menzel". Instead what he said was ". . . Adela Dazeem". Adela Dazeem doesn't sound the teensiest bit like Idina Menzel, which is why we can't let it go.

KKK

Justin Bieber has had better years. A video from 2009 of a then 15- year-old Bieber making racist jokes, laughing about the Ku Klux Klan and using the most offensive of racial slurs to describe black people surfaced. He also faced charges for drunk driving, resisting arrest, driving without a licence and drag racing. A petition to have the Canadian-born singer deported from the US was widely circulated.

La la land

It has been a mad year for actor Shia LaBeouf. You might recognise him from movies such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. As the year started, he was embroiled in a plagiarism row over a screenplay. He apologised. Then he was accused of stealing the apology from Yahoo Answers – and that was just January. Then he told Twitter he was retiring before appearing at the Berlin Film Festival wearing a paper bag carrying the legend "Not Famous Any More". Then he was ejected from Studio 54 in Manhattan after shouting through Cabaret. It has all been "performance art". Apparently.

Martin

The award for most ridiculous row of the year goes to Linda Martin. She and Billy McGuinness had a shouting match on The Late Late Show over Louis Walsh's involvement in our Eurovision selection process. Kasey Smith from the group Can-Linn was eventually chosen to represent Ireland with the song Heartbeat. It stopped beating soon, however: she didn't make it to the final.

Not cool

James Franco met a 17-year-old fan on Broadway after one of his performances in Of Mice and Men. They got talking. He flirted with her via Instagram. She rejected his advances and made them public and he was heavily criticised for hitting on such a young fan.

O’Driscoll

So long, Brian. It was great. You were great.

Pantigate

It's been a rollercoaster of a year for Rory O'Neill, otherwise known as Panti Bliss. An appearance on Brendan O'Connor's Saturday Night Show on RTÉ1 resulted in the national broadcaster issuing an apology a week later to several high-profile individuals who took exception to allegations of homophobia against them made on the programme. RTÉ paid out €85,000 over the incident. The story sparked a national debate. Panti was invited to make a speech in the Abbey in February, which won her new friends such as Madonna, Stephen Fry and Graham Norton. "I thought it was one of the most moving and eloquent calls against oppression I have ever seen," Stephen Fry said when presenting Panti with a People of the Year award this month. It also led to Enda Kenny visiting Panti's bar on Dublin's Capel Street.

Quickly now

Three months ago you'd never heard of Jake Quickenden. Now he's been on The X Factor and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here! What does that say about our world? Nothing good.

RIP

Peaches Geldof. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Robin Williams. Oscar de la Renta. Shirley Temple. Tommy Ramone. Joan Rivers. Mike Nichols. Lauren Bacall. Gabriel García Márquez. Bob Hoskins. Maya Angelou. James Garner. Richard Attenborough. L’Wren Scott. Harold Ramis. Maria von Trapp. Mickey Rooney. Bobby Womack. Ann B Davis. Eli Wallach. Phil Everly. Pete Seeger. Dermot Healy. PD James. Brian Farrell. Lynda Bellingham. Ben Bradlee. Billie Barry. Donald Sinden. Gerry Anderson. Alfredo Di Stéfano. Richie Taylor. Rik Mayall. Sue Townsend.

Swift one

Move over, Jonathan: there's a new Swift in town. And she's gonna rock your world and then shake it off. The lovely Taylor Swift was everywhere this year following the release of 1989. "I've had every part of my life dissected: my choices, my actions, my words, my body, my style, my music. When you live your life under that kind of scrutiny, you can either let it break you or you can get really good at dodging punches. And when one lands, you know how to deal with it. And I guess the way that I deal with it is to shake it off," she told Rolling Stone.

Teddy

Not since the Lindbergh baby kidnapping has a disappearance so gripped a nation. In September, Twink’s dog Teddy went missing. The performer issued an emotional appeal for the return of the Yorkshire terrier, and it worked. A member of the public came across some ne’er-do-wells trying to sell poor Teddy and tipped the guards off, bringing the shaggy dog tale to an end. Teddy’s star was set to rise again on this year’s panto circuit until creative differences put an end to that pup dream.

Unruliness

A week after the Met Gala in the spring, TMZ.com, a site that could teach the Daily Mail a thing or two about celeb-baiting, released footage from a lift of Solangé Knowles hitting her sister Beyoncé's husband, Jay Z. All manner of theories about what had happened circulated. Then they all made friends. Via Instagram. Or at least that is what we were told.

Visionary

When Maria Walsh became the first openly gay winner of the Rose of Tralee she suddenly made what had become an anachronistic throwback to a time when comely maidens danced at the crossroads before racing home to make their man’s tea just a little more modern. “If I could help one young person come out and deal with it in a positive way, then my year as the Rose of Tralee will already have been completed,” she said.

Wave hello

The Oscars played host to a spontaneous and demented moment when Benedict Cumberbatch was snapped waving around like a bad thing behind U2 as they tried to keep it cool on the red carpet. Cumberbatch blamed Ellen DeGeneres for “plying everyone with vodka”. A friend “really wanted me to get a photo with U2. So I just saw the opportunity and I’ve never felt an impulse like it.”

X

Ed Sheeran dominated the music biz. His second album, X, (pronounced "multiply") spent eight weeks at the top of the UK album charts, notching up more than a million sales in that country alone. He was also the most-streamed artist on Spotify. X has had 430 million streams worldwide since its release in June. He also appeared on The Late Late Toy Show, on which he duetted with a young fan and made her cry, in a good way.

YouTube

Dear John Delaney. There is nothing wrong with a few drinks and sing-song in your local after a football match. But if you're the highly paid boss of an international football body, you might want to steer clear of songs supporting violent republicanism on nights when your counterparts in England are apologising for the anti-IRA terrace chanting of their fans. Especially if your team are playing England soon. YouTube is a thing now, you see. And as Joan Burton says, we all have smartphones. Oh, and if you do it anyway, and are caught, you might want to ensure denials and threats of legal action aren't issued.

Zoo

That’s where Beyoncé took her baby girl during the summer. And why wouldn’t she? Dublin Zoo is brilliant.